


Growing Pains

by cipherwriter



Series: Halligan's Adventures as the Spiral [2]
Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Identity Issues, Lydia as an avatar of the spiral, i think, sometimes you just have to get reassurance that even as a monster ppl love you
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-07
Updated: 2020-06-07
Packaged: 2021-03-03 20:07:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,566
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24581308
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cipherwriter/pseuds/cipherwriter
Summary: The creature that was Lydia is now an Avatar of the Spiral, with no idea what that means for it. Who or what has it become, and who or what will it choose to be?(you need part one for this to make sense)
Relationships: Lydia Halligan & Her Mother, Lydia Halligan & Michael | The Distortion
Series: Halligan's Adventures as the Spiral [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1776739
Comments: 5
Kudos: 16
Collections: The_Magnus_Archives_distributedandlicensedbyrustyquill





	Growing Pains

The creature does not need to sleep anymore. (It had not needed to sleep for a while before its transformation, it would seem). It spends its days and nights awake, moving, doing, feeding. Always, always, feeding. It is very hungry.

Still, sometimes, it wants to stop. Rest. Not sleep, but rest. 

Unfortunately, the creature legally does not exist. Or is legally dead. Depends on if you consider the creature to be Lydia Halligan or not. Point is, its flat is no longer its flat. It manages to get some of the things it wanted (its laptop, notebooks, novels) before it is sold and the creature can never enter again.

It is about to leave its flat when it sees, on its bedside table, a birthday card from its mother. It remembers that card. It had read that card often, as it tried to sleep. Its mother told it she loved it.

Well, Lydia’s mother told her she loved her. The creature wasn’t sure if it still applied. 

That was fine. The creature did not need a mother’s love anymore. It had moved beyond that. It had the love of a god, in a way, and not in the way that its parents had always claimed that god loved them. No, this love was real, tangible love, the kind that could sustain the creature without need for anything else, the kind that could be seen in the inky trails it left behind and the rainbows and the lines twisting underneath its eyes. Things change. People change. People change into things. And things do not need a mother or her love.

It takes the card with it when it leaves, anyway.

It leaves out a door in its wall that anyone else would say had not been there before. It knows better. The doors are always there, everywhere, they just are hard to see sometimes.

It has been in The Distortion before. Never as Lydia, because to go into The Distortion as a human is to be absorbed entirely into it, and that is not how the creature became what it is. The creature had been becoming itself its whole life, even when it was human. The creature is the end of a decades long journey.

Once the creature had become itself, though, it was able to visit The Distortion anytime. The Distortion, it learns, is both the name of the domain of hallways and doors and the “name” of its friend, or at least the closest thing to a name that it is comfortable with. That makes things easier for the people that talk about it, evidently. The Distortion does not particularly like being easier to talk about, but there is nothing anyone can really do about the name it has been forced into.

The Distortion is also a place with a floor and walls. So, it is the creature’s new home.

After all, the creature and The Distortion are friends, the only two either of them have in this world. True, the Spiral is enough for them, mostly, but it doesn’t hurt to have others around as well. There is understanding here, and it would be unwelcome from anyone or anything else. But it is each other, and just as it is fulfilling to be feared by victims, it is comfortable to be known and understood by a friend.

The only rule of lodging is that even if the creature sees a human stumbling around the halls, it will not feed off its fear. It’s a fair rule. Besides, the creature likes to act in different ways, keeping people up into the night, giving them nightmares that seem real and waking that seems fake until one is the other and it's all fear and self-doubt. Their domains do not often cross.

The creature sits in its portion of the halls. It has its things here, both the things from its old life and the things it has gained since. It takes from its victims, often, and when it takes things they no longer exist to anyone but it and its victim. It usually takes cool stuff, both because it's what the victim will miss and what the creature will want. It now owns books and artwork and cool clothes and nice jewelry and any number of other interesting things. Its favorite is a first edition Poe. The creature loves horror writing, and it also loves the delicious build of frustration to self doubt to panic that its victim feels at having everyone forget his most valuable position.

It also has the birthday card, still. Its fingers brush over it, and it must make an effort not to let the ink that it usually leaks nowadays mark the front. It is a silly thing on the surface, a Gary Larson cartoon printed onto the firm stock paper. But the creature still does not want to ruin it. 

It does not read it yet.

“You seem to be settling in nicely.”

The creature looks up. The Distortion is standing there, looking around the creature’s little section of its halls. The Distortion looks different than when Lydia had first met it. Its fingers are so terribly long and its eyes are not aligned and it is taller than the ceiling should be but it does not have to duck down. Its hair is still long and blonde and curly, though.

“Thank you, for the place,” the creature says. Its voice does not float and lilt like The Distortion’s does, but instead shakes and turns and twists.

“It’s what friends do, is it not?” The Distortion says.

“I wouldn’t know. You are my first in a long time.” The creature feels like the fading wallpaper of a childhood bedroom.

The Distortion sits down next to the creature, long pointed limbs folding into itself like an accordion, compressing itself like it’s being vacuum sealed, until it’s about the same size as the creature. 

They sit together and look around for a moment. The space in the creature where its brain should be/used to be/is (the creature does not actually know if it still has a brain) buzzes oddly. It wants to think about things, but like all else about it, thinking has changed and twisted and doesn’t work the same as it used to. It is reminded of the story of the frog prince and it can understand how the prince must have felt when the curse was first placed on it.

“You seem unhappy,” The Distortion says. “Are you hungry?”

“No,” the creature says, then spares another glance at the card. It does not know quite exactly what is wrong or what it is feeling, but it seems its mouth has some idea, because it asks, “What was it like for you, when you first Became?”

The Distortion hummed in thought, its static background sound raising in volume. “It hurt. It was long and painful and when I emerged I had a lot of feelings that I still tried to understand and control. It is the same for you?”

The creature nods. 

“That is how it is with many of those like us, even those who serve others.” The Distortion begins to buzz even louder. “But I am not like you are. I never was like you were.”

“Then how were you?” the creature asks.

“I am The Distortion, but I am also-” The Distortion’s voice turns bitter, smells of burning rubber, “I am also Michael. And neither of us wanted to become the other.”

“Michael was human, like I once was,” the creature says.

“Yes. And no.” The Distortion looks down at the creature. “You were always marked for the Spiral, from birth. Some people are like that. Michael was not, not exactly. He was forced to be the Spiral, The Distortion, and The Distortion was forces to be him. Michael was supposed to be able to think and feel and exist, and The Distortion was not. We are now inbetween.”

The creature wants to offer comfort. It’s just not sure that’s something that can exist for the two of them anymore. Still, it reaches out to place its hand over the Distortion’s long, mangled one, and the Distortion offers it a crooked smile. Its hand is turning multicolored, the spirals from the creature’s fingers spreading all over its palm and knife-like fingers.

The creature looks down once again. “Did Michael have a mother?”

The Distortion’s hallways turn dark and red and green and brown. Its background whining turns high pitched and discordant, loud and constant. “Of a sort,” it says.

The creature does not ask any more questions.

Near the creature’s space in The Distortion’s halls, there is a door. It is the creature’s door. It opens on the empty billboard outside its old flat. None of the people on the street notice it as it goes in and out. It can ask The Distortion to open doors elsewhere, but it can leave out here any time. 

The creature has just used the door. Now, it sits on the edge of the billboard’s holder and looks out over the city that had never felt like a home, in this world that had never felt like its own. It holds the birthday card from Lydia’s mother (its mother?) in its hands. It still has not opened it. It remembers what it says, and maybe that is why it has not. It’s afraid that the words have changed, like everything else in its life.

It has changed so much. It jumps down from its perch up high and is not hurt. Its legs are hard and sturdy like lead, like how they had felt when it had been Lydia and she had been exhausted, but they crackle and glow with electric veins, like how they had felt when it had been Lydia and she had been manic.

In its reflection in the windows of the storefronts that it walks past now its skin is so very pale, except for the midnight blue ink coating its hands and curling up its arms, the bags under its eyes that have turned all colors imaginable and some not, the dark shadows at its cheeks and collarbones where the bones now jut out. Its hair, already curly before, has grown long and erratic, knotted all over the place under its white beanie. It is a monster now, and it should not mind, it had chosen this, but it cannot stop thinking of the birthday card and the mother that wrote it.

It is going to visit her. That is why it is out here. It only realizes this as it arrives at the mother’s house. It has difficulty knowing what it is doing sometimes.

It does not need to knock. It could simply get into the flat, it is sure of this. But it feels normal to knock. Polite. It misses things like that.

It misses being Lydia, a little.

So, it knocks on the door and tries to shrink down a bit like the Distortion can. It’s not as good at it yet, still learning how to mold its body the way it wants to, but it at least now feels like it can keep itself constrained to one defined size, even if that is seven feet tall.

The door opens. In the doorway stands a woman of about sixty (the creature knows she is 59) with graying black hair wearing casual jeans and a t-shirt. She looks at the creature, shrieks, and slams the door shut.

The creature tries not to take it too personally. It knew this would happen. It just has to get her to talk to it and maybe she’ll see what the creature really is. 

And if she does, maybe she can tell the creature what, exactly, that is.

So the creature knocks again, and this time calls out to her as well, “Please, I want to talk,” it says, with its voice that moves here and there like a figure eight in the air. “Please-” It cannot say mom. It does not know if it is accurate anymore. “Please, Catherine.”

There is a moment of silence behind the door. Then, Catherine yells through it, “How do you know my name?” 

“I am the thing that your daughter became,” the creature says. There is a longer silence now.

Catherine opens the door again, slower, and just an inch. She looks the creature up and down, eyeing its nearly unrecognizable body. But then her eyes lock onto the birthday card still held nervously in its hands, and she looks up at the creature’s face. Sees the undereye bags and the beanie that Lydia had always worn.

She opens the door more in shock. “Lydia?”

“I don’t know,” the creature says. “I don’t know what I am anymore. I don’t know. I don’t know.” Its voice has gotten sharper, and it sees Catherine cover her ears and it’s hurting her, oh god no, but it can’t stop. “I don’t know I don’t know I don’t know idon’tknowidon-”

Arms wrap around the creature at its torso, and it falls down to the ground like a smashed vase. Its back is stroked there on the porch of its/Lydia’s/whatever’s childhood home and it wonders if the neighbors can see it or anything that’s happening.

Hey, cool. It just wondered something.

Catherine pushes it back away from her, but only so that she can look at it straight on. She’s got marks on her hands and face, little swirls that seem to keep growing on her cheeks. There’s redness there, too, as though she just got a bad carpet burn. “Listen to me, Lydia.” The creature opens its mouth, but Catherine holds up her hand. “I know you said you don’t know if that’s you anymore. And if you take a new name or something… I don’t know, I can’t pretend to understand what’s going on here. But if you don’t feel like Lydia anymore that’s okay. But whatever you are, whatever you become, you will always be my child, and I will always be your mother. Nothing that happens is ever going to change that.”

The creature had not expected this. It had wanted it, yes, but it had expected to be turned away. Told that it was a monster, because that’s what it is now, it knows this. It eats fear. It can feel the fear radiating off of Catherine as they sit curled up against each other, knows that even just touching it is causing Catherine pain. 

But still, it believes what she says because it believes her arms around it, firm and strong, and the way that she still smells like the same perfume as she’d always used, and how her brown eyes are tearing up and she looks at it like it’s a miracle. It must be a miracle to her; it’s her child back from the dead.

Inky tears fill the creature’s eyes and it cannot see at all, but that’s okay because it doesn’t have to see to be held and reassured by its mother. It doesn’t have to know who or what it is outside of being the child of Catherine Halligan.

“Halligan,” it says suddenly.

“What’s that, dear?” its mother asks, pulling back again.

“I think my name is Halligan.”

Halligan’s mother smiles at it. “I think that’s a wonderful choice.”


End file.
